Turn Left, No Right, Wait, Meet In The Middle?

Directions are something many of us have taken for granted until mid-March when the pandemic hit. Agency communications professionals are used to giving directions to navigate clients through strategies and programs that deliver results. Today, these directions are changing by the day, and in some cases by the minute. And waiting isn’t an option. What is though is updating. Updating your communications strategies to reflect the day, hour, a minute or even the moment is respectable.

Pending your area of expertise, the moment could be as critical as reporting an update on the number of COVID-19 patients you’ve taken care of in a particular hospital. For others, the minute can change based on how the banks are handling the stimulus package. And for most, its day-by-day evolving changes based on the client’s client, the emerging pandemic news, and how it affects each company.

For those of us in mainstream tech, it’s about realizing that we have the tools, knowledge and through communications professionals the where-with-all to get the message out quickly as to ‘how to remotely work,’ ‘how to keep your social life going,’ ‘how to celebrate holidays’ and ‘how to educate.’ Tech is the connected tissue keeping the global workforce together while keeping everyone’s ‘sanity’ in place by offering streaming videos, gaming, and work opportunities that have emerged that would never have otherwise been thought of, until now.

Now is the time to re-evaluate your vision for 2020 and counsel your clients that there is certainty in the uncertainty. And that is there will be an end to the pandemic as the world, literally the globe, is in the same boat. Some will come out of this stronger, some a bit weaker but it will end. Planning for that end is just as essential as living day-by-day through it. Communications professionals need to pull from their experience and recall various situations that have happened throughout history whether it be war, 9/11, or not as an epidemic to all but epidemic to one.

Those skills and experience gained will be what takes you through this next chapter, as history is being written in times like these. This pandemic will be a case study not only for crisis communications professionals but for all PR professionals that are tasked to communicate messaging, social media and more.

What advice should we give until the pandemic subsides?

Facts. It’s important that we deal with facts, not opinions or politics but rather facts. Journalists have an obligation, as do PR professionals to uncover the facts, even if changing as you can update the facts in real time. It is the facts that enabled educated guesses when things are unknown. It is experience that guides the path forward in the unknown. And it is the expertise that takes you through the unknown. Together we will turn left and right, but what really matters is that we all meet in the middle.

Respond

Valerie Christopherson is founder and CEO of Global Results Communications (GRC), an award-winning public relations firm trusted by both entrepreneurs on the cusp of new discoveries and multi-billion-dollar enterprises breaking new ground. A graduate of CSUF, Valerie holds a bachelor’s degree in both English and communications with a public relations emphasis. She also completed a social media certification program at University of California, Irvine. Valerie is an opinion columnist for the CEOWORLD magazine.

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